4 ms·

Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original st

Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if magneto-optical drives had been continuously developed, we'd be looking at pretty reasonable capacities today. Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.

throwanem 4y ago
You can format a Hi-MD for data. It's very slow by modern standards, especially in random access, and the media is so rare and thus costly there's no point except for the sake of it - I only have one, and at $60 a pop I wouldn't have any except that the seller I bought my MZ-RH1 from forgot to check if a disc was in it before shipping. But it works. A modern development of that technology would have greater capacity, sure, but I can't imagine how it would approach the low random-access latency of solid-state media.